


Mesh

by chuutoku



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: Drama, Gen, Irony??, M/M, Marginally Less Depressing, Slightly More Pretentious
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 18:41:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuutoku/pseuds/chuutoku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>College AU, narrated by Makishima. Written as a series of short vignettes spanning one academic year. Sporadically updated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> Goodness, this is -- old. Embarrassingly old by Internet standards; I wrote this months and months and months (and months, and months, and I think there's one more month in there) ago after planning out the entirety of the AU, down to Kogami and co.'s class schedules. As it tends to go, irl concerns (and a killer case of writer's block) prevented me from writing any more than I'm about to upload, but I may continue this fic sometime in the future as fancy strikes me. I can't promise anything, but -- since the Psycho Pass fandom is still relatively small, I wanted to upload what little I'd written anyway! Enjoy.

  
_“When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You’re seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you’re worth.”_ \-- Haruki Murakami, _Kafka on the Shore_  


One might say I’ve suffered from a single, singular obsession since childhood. Freud, Ainsworth, Jung.... Surely each offer fascinating theories as to what traumatic events transpired in my formative years to reduce me to _this_ , a small man (always, always) hunched over or curled around even smaller stacks of (bound, loose-leaf, perforated) paper. For example: I may have not yet made it past (nor will I ever, at this rate) the latency stage of psychosexual development; my mother’s longtime ambivalence towards my needs and desires could have resulted in a crippling anxious-avoidant insecure attachment style; or perhaps my self was supplanted by my shadow during the personality individuation process, whenever and however that occurred. But the fascinating is not always correct (-- wouldn’t I know!) nor useful, and in my case, I think metaphor would do the job better.

Consider society a sort of malfunctioning sieve. We use sieves to sift unwanted elements from a solution when cooking or performing experiments. What’s wanted is supported by the same mesh that allows what’s unwanted to fall through its holes into who-knows-where. Unfortunately -- through strenuous use or faulty manufacturing (probably both) -- the gaps in this particular sieve called “society” stretch wider and wider as one grows older, such that there comes a point when you, too, fall to who-cares-where, and are “gone,” in a very important sense, forever.

Most of us have either already fallen or will fall. Some of us are caught by other sieves with finer meshes, where we stay until we are gone, in the most important sense, forever, deprived of our minds and bodies and hearts by death. Some of us deprive our selves of those minds and bodies and hearts prematurely. Some of us never notice anything (the mesh, the people, their falling), while others -- the smallest some, from personal experience -- notice too much too early and opt out of this “sieve” thing altogether. We sit perched upon the sieve’s rim where we watch its contents dwindle. Occasionally we give it a good kick to speed up the process, or to spare some fleck of somebody from falling for a while. The rest of the time, we read. We obtain knowledge and understanding through painstaking analysis rather than by painful experience, and sometimes, we share this knowledge and understanding by writing. Case in point.

…. I should mention the “we” is royal here. My attempts to make myself a little less lonely have enjoyed only temporary success. And that’s the crux, isn’t it? Even I know survey and observation are no substitutes for the understanding that comes through lived experience.

So the questions remain: Is there an inherent beauty to the human soul? How can we (plural, now) perceive it? Is it a stable quality, or does it vary by the perceiver and the perceived? Can it be cultivated? Can it be destroyed? Is it worthwhile? In what sense? In perpetuity?

What have you taught me? Who would I be today if I’d had a special friend like yours?


	2. 2

I sometimes wonder if you would have come to see my side of things had we met in our childhood. Or, perhaps, I would have come to see yours, and might have spared you and yours and mine much trouble.

I sometimes wonder if it was necessarily _you_ I had to meet and befriend. I think your teaching assistant would have done the job just as well, maybe better; perhaps your professor could have accounted for her weaknesses, could have shared with me the common sense he gave to you. What if you had taken Color Theory and I had taken Introduction to Criminology, Introduction to Social Psychology? What if I had met your teachers and you had met mine? (Please take these questions seriously, however trivial they seem. We see the progression of our lives as something more than mere coincidence only because accepting chance's responsibility for that progression is frightening – to most. I think it's rather charming.)

I sometimes wonder if, in the end, you would have cared so much had I meddled with the life of any other person – a classmate in comparative literature, a stranger you often saw at the gym. It's a pity your anger led to this, to my writing (to? about? for?) you in a medium half-impersonal and half-intimate – but it was a beautiful anger, all the lovelier because it doomed us both, and made our “then” a permanent fixture of our present and future. For that, I'm pleased.

But.

(But of course there's a “but.” What reason would I have to write this otherwise?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The teaching assistant Makishima refers to here is Akane; the professor, Saiga. (That -- was supposed to be revealed later in this long, long fic, but because I'm not sure if I'll ever finish it, I thought I'd mention it anyway!)


	3. 3

Oryo Rikako's October cabaret.

I'm sure her troupe of near-naked girls (bless those well-placed bouquets) stood out to you as much as the persons clothed (caged?) in ornate, full-body costumes. I, on the other hand, had been her acquaintance for only a month before my brief fascination in her artwork dwindled to a bored disgust. The themes were too simple, too standard; nothing expensive material and hours in the studio could salvage.

I tolerated Rikako's company until the dinner and show were done, assured her I looked forward to the long critique we would inevitably make during Color Theory next Wednesday, and asked if she might point me towards the nearest restroom. Please feel free to attend to your other guests in the meantime, I told her. I have a brilliant sense of direction. So brilliant, in fact, that I managed to find her father's library _before_ a freckled freshman and her similarly nondescript girl( )friend rushed inside for a moment of privacy, only to receive a moment of utter mortification instead.

Ten o'clock became twelve before I heard the door _click!_ open again – more softly, this time – and looked up from my reading (Nietzsche's _Birth of Tragedy_ ; what happy irony) to see you looking pleasantly intoxicated and pleasantly surprised. You broke our silence first.

“The Dystopic/Post-Apocalyptic Novel?”

“Yes.”

“Professor Touma?”

“Yes.”

A second's recollection before you said:

“Makishima Shogo.”

“It's a hard name to forget,” I smiled. “Care to take a seat, Kogami Shinya? You're starting to look like you need it.”

You shook your head only to stumble into the armchair regardless.

“That had everything to do with my shoes and nothing to do with anything else,” you insisted, extending a pointy foot. “I think they're a half-size too big.”

“That so,” I murmured, returning to Nietzsche's distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian.

“You haven't seen a guy with a bad crew cut and a couple chicks come in here, have you?”

“Your friends?”

“Just the one,” you corrected me. “I started looking for him ten minutes ago. Wouldn't respond to any of my texts.”

“Must be busy.”

You made a sound somewhere between a scoff and a chuckle, flipped open your phone while I flipped a page.

“Gotta say, I'm not looking forward to finding him.”

“Don't, then.”

“Depends on what's less unpleasant: Walking into an orgy or talking to you.”

“Well, I can't guarantee 'less unpleasant,'” I said, replacing my bookmark as you set your phone on the table, “but I _can_ promise 'more stimulating.'”

You enjoyed my joke.

We spoke until your friend called you – to say that he had misplaced his room key somewhere in Rikako's mansion and that he had wandered back to the dorms only to discover Ginoza had gone out to breakfast, so “could you get the hell over here before I pass out in the corridor and/or Shion shoves her heel into my unsuspecting buttcheek, please and thank you” – at seven in the morning.

“Sure thing, Sasayama,” you sighed, stood, stretched – glanced at me expectantly.

“I'd like to finish this,” I said, holding up the book. “It's not mine.”

You nodded. “See you on Monday. I'll say this while I still don't regret staying up all night: Nice meeting you, Makishima.”

“You, too, Kogami.”

How did we spend those seven hours?

I remember the low ticks of the library's wooden clock; the lazy way you sat, slouched into the cushions, one cheek propped against your fist; the thirst neither of us would bother quenching as we spoke, and spoke, and lapsed into silence, and spoke again.

You met all my expectations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) The near-naked girls from Rikako's cabaret are a shout-out to her creepy sculptures from the anime; same deal with the ornate, full-body costumes and the anime's avatars.  
> 2) Shion is one of the live-in hall moderators at Kogami, Sasayama, and Ginoza's dormitory.  
> 3) "The Dystopic/Post-Apocalyptic Novel" is a class in their university's comparative literature department.


	4. Chapter 4

The Kogami Shinya I got to know that night had graduated top of his class and come to college with his closest friend from high school, Ginoza Nobuchika. They had requested each other as roommates, but, as it usually goes, were informed a few weeks before first term began that they would be sharing a triple with a boy named Sasayama Mitsuru.

“Match made in hell,” Kogami said. “Sasayama and Gino have a single thing in common, and that something's nothing you'd ever want to share with another person.”

Among the many things Ginoza and Sasayama did not have in common were bedtimes (12am at the latest for one, at the earliest for the other); dispositions (a moth, a beetle); pastimes (one gardened while the other slept, and later slept while the other partied); personal styles (button-downs in bold, somber colors shared closet space with patterned pants and purely ironic argyles); study habits (stubborn versus next to none); and sense of humor (next to none versus perverse). Most pivotally for our protagonist, neither was aware that the other had _also_ told Kogami about his _own_ father.

“Different situations, similar feelings,” Kogami summarized.

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“What's your relationship to your father?”

“I can't say I have one to get emotional over.”

(Occasionally I wonder how a conversation between Sasayama and Ginoza with respect [but most likely otherwise] towards their fathers might have gone, had Kogami thought to set one up or Sasayama been present for a second school term. I suspect it would've been a humbling experience for them both, to speak with a boy whose father had so mistreated his biological children and another boy whose father had so loved the child of his wife's affair with another man. But I digress.)

“And you?”

“What about me?”

Kogami smirked. “What's _your_ relationship to _your_ father?”

“Economical,” I replied.

He understood I meant it literally as much as I meant it figuratively.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Gosh, daddy issues everywhere -- Sasayama's are similar to the ones in the novel series; Ginoza's follow a weeeirddd interpretation of his relationship with Masaoka that I wrote about aaagesss ago:
> 
> so i’d thought that picture of masaoka and ginoza in masaoka’s hideout was strange ever since we’d seen it in episode i-can’t-even-remember-right-now. why? because where the fuck was ginoza’s mom? even assuming she had been the one to take the picture, why wasn’t there another picture of ginoza’s mother? what was the deal between masaoka and ginoza’s mother? recall the conversation between masaoka and ginoza waaay back when things sucked less: “you abandoned me and mom,” ginoza said. initially, i had thought masaoka had just been really attached to his job — and that’s certainly true, but it’s not the full truth, and it wouldn’t explain the strength and duration of ginoza’s hatred for him. what would? if there were mutual mixed feelings between ginoza and his father, i.e. what if masaoka were unsure ginoza was actually his son? so the situation is now — ginoza loved his father when he was a child; his father loved ginoza (but felt weird as shit about it, because he wasn’t sure if ginoza was his own kid); masaoka had a strained relationship with his romantic partner (ginoza’s mom) because of it; his confusion and uncertainty bled into his work; masaoka slipped into latent criminality when he saw no place for a detective like him in his job nor as ginoza’s father or masaoka-mama’s lover, etc. sounds like a huuuge stretch, i realize (and it has its canon issues, i.e. is committing adultery a crime masaoka-mama would’ve been targeted by sibyl for? wouldn’t it have been relatively easy to perform a dna test on ginoza to figure out who his “real” father was?), but it makes sense of the final conversation between father and son (masaoka: “your eyes do match mine;” ginoza: “it’s too late for that!!”). not to mention it plays with the focus on eyes throughout the show, and gives a ready example for makishima’s critique against sibyl: that sibyl has eradicated the meaning “community” once held, and consequently we no longer construct our identities based on our personal connections and intimate relationships of all kinds. in fact, because of sibyl, these things have been substituted for a solitude that should, theoretically, bring one a singular happiness. CLEARLY NOT, though, and ginoza and masaoka’s relationship (is just one of the many that) demonstrates this and sibyl’s self-destructive nature. they couldn’t understand what had happened to them until one of them died.
> 
> (.... I told you it was weird....)


End file.
